A new fossil, Vulpes mathisoni, has been named after Mark Mathison, teaching laboratory coordinator in the geological and atmospheric sciences department.

Mathison helped discover the fox fossil in 2003 in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia.

“12 years ago, in 2003, I was in Ethiopia down on the Omo River on the Kenya border,” Mathison said.

There, Mathison found a skull with the lower jaw still attached and one of the vertebrae, part of the spinal cord, still attached.

Finding a skull as complete as Vuples mathisoni is a rare feat.

“How likely are you to find that kind of preservation in a vertebrate fossil across the world? It’s very, very rare,” said Aaron Wood, director of the Carl F. Vondra Geology Field Station and lecturer in geology.

The Vulpes mathisoni fossil is about 4.2 million years old. The first foxes appeared about 11 million years ago.

“This fox was wandering around when Lucy or Australopithecus were wandering around,” Mathison said.

The Australopithecus fossil, also known as Lucy, was one of the first examples of primates found that help link the theory of evolution.

“It fleshes out the whole story of the environment when the early ancestors or hominids were evolving,” Mathison said.

The Vulpes mathisoni skull is currently being held in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

“Kenya and Ethiopia have that rule that any fossils found have to stay there,” Mathison said. “You can’t even take them out and borrow them. That’s probably why it took 12 years to describe this.” 

The Vulpes mathisoni is a link to the biological history of Earth.

“You can’t know the story without knowing who the characters are,” Wood said.

This discovery allows for a greater understanding of Earth’s past and the progress of biological development.

“The communities of animals were very different in the past,” Wood said.

The Vulpes mathisoni does not look like a normal depiction of a fox. While it is an ancestor of the red fox, it is closer to the pale fox found in Africa, which has larger ears and a smaller face than the red fox.